German website Heise Online has received confirmation that IBM is terminating its Cell processor line. This means that no future development will take place, making the PoweXCell 8i the last Cell processor. Parts of the Cell project will still make it into future processor designs, however.

Actually, the CELL cpu was quite slow on most things. For instance, the SUN Niagara at 1.4GHz was more than 13 times faster than the 3.2GHz CELL at string pattern matching, if the working set is large. If the working set is tiny, then the 3.2GHz CELL cpu is roughly 50% faster than the 1.4GHz Niagara. But who is interested in tiny working sets, in real life there is always large working sets.